Hi. I still use LJ, follow my friends and similar, but I've moved my main host to Dreamwidth, and crosspost everything here.

Mat Bowles. It's fully interoperative, the OpenID comment functions there are good and improving, and I follow everything from both sites without problem.

So, made a very long comment on an old contact (psythor) Substack, in response to his The BBC is heading into a death spiral and we should worry about it and having never commented there before it might've got lost in the shuffle

As I'm sat at my desk (weirdly, appears my desire to sit at a desk grows in August/September?), you lucky lucky people get to read it as well, just in case. I'm not formatting it too much tho because, well, effort ;-)

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I think, overall, you're right, but...

There are two points regarding the BBC competing with streaming that are something that could be solved easily, because it's to do with the mindset within the Beeb

Because even on a much lower budget, they're not even trying--most of the bigger, succesful streaming shows, especially Disney, are genre based, superhero, SF, fantasy, supernatural. The BBC still, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, thinks of that as kids stuff, and therefore we get Doctor Who and occasional attempts to replicate a "family" show

The idea that YA/teens/40+geeky adults might want to watch genre stuff aimed at them is culturally beyond them (yes, I am still bitter they cancelled The Fades for spurious reasons)

The other is costs--a lot of the cost of US big budget TV is cast/crew, US shows famously overpay their stars by international standards, and that is dragging pay up in competing global sectors but...

The BBC can make similar shows, in a similar style, on a much smaller budget

The biggest problem is they don't, at all, want to try :-(

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Five years. Five years without posting. Oops, that wasn't intended. We've moved house, new desk I've setup with the laptop and a spare monitor--the linux desktop doesn't appear to have survived 6 months in storage, propably fixable, it''s On The List, but nowhere near top. Anyway, going to try to start posting regularly, because, well, Facebook is evil, Twitter sucks and Mastodon is a bit of a loss. So, memes are easy, right?

( long Q&A about cookingCollapse ) That was long. Oops, was meant to go to Tesco before it shut, ah well.

And the DW markdown editor doesn't like number dot format posts it thinks it's an ordered list, ah well, fixed now I hope

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I love gram flour. It's awesome, you can do so many things with it and it's gluten free¹. OK, mostly what I do with it is make a batter an deep fry stuff, but that's just nice.

I've messed around making bhajis, pakoras and, well, stuff. Tonight, I went for chunks of halloumi cheese and some quorn cocktail sausages I'd forgotten to use when we had guests Sunday.

An ounce of flour, enough water mixed in gradually to make it a cream consistency, poured over the chunks of stuff then deep fried at 180°C until it's golden brown.

Because I can handle low amounts of undeveloped² gluten I've replaced wraps with my old approach to sandwich making, so while that cools a bit (the 180°C bit is your hint it's hot) I put some rocket (USians: arugula) and spinach (everyone: the stuff popeye got from cans, some dressing (Tesco cheap salad cream) then put the battered stuff in and wrap it up.

Lovely. And, vaguely, healthy, if you ignore the transfats from the super hot sunflower oil.

1) ground up dried chickpeas, also known as chickpea or besan flour
2) you know breads and pizza dough needs kneading? Yeah, that's to develop the gluten, if it's had that done I can't eat it

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by AnActionfigure, on Flickr

via: jimhines | Cool Stuff Friday and The old man of the forest | The Brothers Brick | LEGO Blog

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I still love Rocky Horror, despite the age now showing, especially with the gender politics stuff (it was radical and progressive at the time).

Going through my archives^[1] I found the video I posted 5 years ago has succumbed to bitrot and a takedown notice, so I had a quick look and found two alternative versions:

That one's just a different fan edit of clips from all the films referenced, I think it's fairly well done but for some of the clips I prefer this one:

Which claims to be close to what O'Brian wanted for the film before test screenings and similar.

Neither has the jarring NuWho Cybermen in that, I suspect, caused the takedown of the original, and I really love the timings of the film title sequences with the lyrics for the first. Anyone got a favourite?

1) For the London Calling 2014 Worldcon promo vid as it's far far better than the Dublin 2019 vid.

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7 film and TV series set in the exciting world of municipal government::

Gritty political thriller about a corruption scandal in which car companies buy up Los Angeles' streetcar network, purely so they can rip it up, thus forcing the public to buy more cars. Also features a cartoon rabbit.

By that strange bloke jonnelledge.

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I like working on open source projects—just updated the gameplay description for humanity in Free Orion:

Description:
Humans are bipedal, clannish and omniverous, with incredible endurance capabilities. Humans evolved tool use in order to better hunt their pray, and would pursue much larger animals for days if necessary in order to bring it down and then eat it. Modern humans still have a strong fight or flight response but any threat an individual cannot handle will be met by a larger group working together to defeat it with overwhelming force. Humans have been known to eat items they know to be indigestible, simply to prove they can do it, and use toxic substances as seasoning to flavour their food.

Society:
Modern humans have formed geographic nation states with a strong basis in historic tribes. These states compete with each other, sometimes to the extent of going to war, while still cooperating on other issues. Differences over religion, resource use and even the correct way to cook a particular meal are still used to justify aggressive acts, and these wars act as spurs for further technological progress.

I took inspiration from two Tumblr posts which diverged from the same source in that annoying "how are you meant to follow all this" manner that Tumblr tends to encourage. I rather like that (the description was "Mostly Harmless", this is a bit more accurate).

We're working on the final coding for the next stable release (0.4.5) at the moment, test builds for Win and Mac are normally released weekly here and, well, a bughunt is ongoing.

It's a 4X space exploration and conquest strategy game, taking inspiration from old classics like Masters Of Orion but definitely not trying to ape them, although it's nowhere near finished, it's definitely very playable, if you like strategy games generally it's rather fun, more details on the FreeOrionWiki, but that's always out of date (every time I update a bit we do more work).

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Doomtown Reloaded is launched at Gencon this coming weekend, with a worldwide release date set for September 8th.

Writing the official pre-launch FAQ for a card game from scratch is even less fun than I thought it was going to be. Doing it just from PDFs of the cards and rulebook? Yeah…

My brain hurts. Still, one of the AEG forum mods made this rather nifty set of Doomtown Avatars including ones scaled for DW/LJ size, so you get Deputy Wendy Cheng pointing a rifle at you for now.

There's even a chance I might consider changing my default icon, if I'm to be the Sheriff of this game then I might as well be the Sheriff, at least on occasions.

Reading around various news sites, and the pre Con buzz for several of them is that D&D5th and Doomtown are the games people are anticipating at Gencon. Given some of the other games launching, that's impressive. It also means a whole lot of geeky gamers asking me pesky questions for quite some time. Which, on the one hand, is good, a succesfull (re)launch means the game has legs. On the other hand…

Oh, I setup doomtown, but haven't a clue what to do with it yet.

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Just had a second slice, it hadn't quite finished setting before I turned in last night so a very late pudding. Based, loosely, on two recipe's in Mary Berry's Baking Bible but with a few variants of my own.

Ingredients:

The base:
Half a packet of Tesco Value Ginger Nuts (150g)
2 ounces butter (I used Tesco own brand salted, that's about 1/5th a pack).
1 ounce brown sugar (any will do, recipe calls for demerara, I used light brown baking sugar).

The Topping:
4/5ths a pack of Tesco Full Fat soft cheese (about 175g)
150 ml double cream (I used some cheap stuff)
1 tin condensed milk (again, one of the cheap brands is fine)
Zest and juice of 4 limes

And yes, I know I mixed imperial and metric in the ingredients list, it's fine.

You also need a 23cm cake tin or flan tin, I used a Sainsbury Cook's Collection springform thing I got in a sale awhileback, the Cook's Collection stuff is REALLY good but pricey, they put it on sale fairly regularly, buy what you can afford when they do, seriously. From experience, line the base of the tin with a bit of overlap, I didn't do this hence you're not getting a picture.

Crush the biscuits in a bag using a rolling pin or similar—an empty cereal bag is perfect for this, cheap thin plastic bags not so much, but I managed to avoid spilling too much…

Melt the butter over a low heat in a medium pan, once all melted remove from heat, mix in the sugar and the biscuit crumbs—note, don't do this in a milk pan, it's not big enough and you'll spill stuff (note the trend here). Once mixed in you'll have a nearly solid mix, push that into the base of the tin and put it in the fridge.

Next up, put the cheese, cream and condensed milk into your mixing bowl with the lime zest (but not the juice, yet). I heartily recommend an electric whick or mixer for the next bit, I bought a cheap one from Wilko last year and it's So Much Easier. Whisk all this together and keep whisking for a bit. Slowly start adding in the juice in small amounts, keep whisking. It'll start to thicken, for me it started to really thicken after the juice started being added so be careful from now on, miss_s_b tells me the acid in the juice reacts with the cream to thicken. Keep going, slowly adding the juice, until the mixture is very thick.

Now, pour, prod and spoon the cream mixture into the tin on top of the biscuit base. Try to get as much in as possible and resist the temptation to taste too much (I almost managed this bit). Put in the fridge to set, it'll take at least 3 hours in the fridge, probably more, overnight is best. Don't be tempted to take it out before set, it'll make a mess.

You can, if you want, put some whipped cream on top, top with strawberrys, etc, but I didn't bother, it didn't need it. Total cost about £4 depending on ingredient quality, plus £30ish of equipment, you could do it with a hand whisk but, um, you'll need strong whisking muscles.

Enjoy.

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Made these to follow on from Jennie cooking a sausage casserole (separate Quorn for me) based on a Grauniad recipe from yesterday, as the oven was on I made pudding. They're very nice, and very sour, citrussy cakes. And I really do mean sour.

Theoretically, I bake these so we've something nice to finish and some left for the next day. 12 of them, 4 of us, 3 each, they're all gone almost immediately, every time...

• 3 oz Butter/baking fat/margerine (softened if necessary)
  
• 3 oz Caster Sugar
  
• 1 large egg
  
• 3 oz Self Raising Flour
  
• 1 oz dry Semolina (or ground almonds or rice flour, I'm allergic to almonds so I substitute)
  
• Juice of 2 limes (or just pour in what looks like enough from a bottle of lime juice)

Plus, for the topping

• Zest of one lime, pared using a zester
  
• Juice of 2 limes (or see above)
  
• 2 oz sugar (any, I used granulated)

Right, simple method. Preheat oven to 180^oC, 12 cake cases in a tray ready for you.

Cream the fat and sugar in a bowl until light and fluffy, slowly beat in the egg in smallish amounts (if you've never done this before say in comments and I'll do more detail). Add the flour and semolina (sifted if necessary to get lumps out), folding in, then fold in the lime juice. Divide into the cases and put in oven for 20 to 25 minutes.

In the meantime, make the topping, put your zest into a pan, add the juice and the sugar, mix it then put on the hob on a low heat, slowly bring it to the boil, stirring regularly. When it's boiling, lower the heat to minimum to simmer it until it turns into a nice sticky syrup, normally takes about 5 minutes. NB I did this bit while eating the main course, stirring regularly is not the same as stirring constantly.

Ideally, the syrup'll be ready just before the cakes are-they need to be a golden brown colour. Get them out of the oven, immediately prick the tops with a skewer or just a fork, then spoon some of the syrup (including zesty bits) over each cake, try to make sure most of it soaks into the cake not flowing over the side. It is a sugar syrup just off the heat, it will be HOT, bear that in mind.

When you've got all the syrup spread around the cakes, put them onto a wire rack and allow to cool until, ideally, actually room temperature, but normally they don't last long enough in our house. The syrup itself is very nice in small quantities on its own, but very sour. Which we like.

Right, job done. You can use the exact same recipt for oranges (one orange instead of two limes) or lemons (1 and a half lemons), and theoretically more sugar in the syrup'll reduce the sourness, but I wouldn't want to. You could also add a bit of ground ginger to the cake mix (for lime) or ground cinnamon if you're doing the orange variant.

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